Just a reminder to everyone, the KRACH wouldn’t have really solved the problems of the Pairwise this year either. In fact the KRACH had TWO sub .500 teams in the tournament, Minnesota-Duluth and Wisconsin.

In all fairness I don’t believe the Pairwise or the KRACH is the problem per se. I believe what has happened this year is a SYMPTOM of a much bigger problem, and that’s an excess of conference games and dramatically unbalanced non-conference schedules that has become a mainstay of college hockey (and sports in general)

Because there are so few non-conference games and less common opponent comparisons, outliers such as the Nebraska-Omaha / Princeton series can dramatically swing comparisons. The excess of league games has been overlooked mainly because with the exception of the ECAC which only plays 22 games (probably due to the Ivies) this is the way it has always been. The issue is that these statistical systems are built around very impractical numbers when trying to compare teams against ALL of NCAA Hockey.

The BCS has the same problem because of the limited number of games played overall in college football. Somehow 11 or 12 games determine a champion between 100 plus teams, and guess who’s usually at the top? Teams from the power conferences.

In the short term, the likely fix to our Pairwise issues will be a band-aid fix. No teams below .500 in the tournament, road bonuses returning, who knows. But it doesn’t fix the problem. The data set is. The question is, how do we do it and can we? Or is this the best it will ever get?